Most of us will be in familiar territory when we talk about using vocabulary as a tool for persuasion. To begin with, hardly ever are we neutral in our choice of words. Parents slant their words in particular ways to reinforce their parenting. Children do the same things to get what they want or get away with things. Our enemies do it to denigrate us in the eyes of others. Religious fanatics do it to make the faithful suspend their disbelief despite overwhelming evidence that they shouldn’t. Advertisers do it to make us part with our money gladly or without guilt. Ideologues and seekers of public office do it to prime us up for their political agenda. With no exception, all of us subtly stamp our words with a personal bias to persuade others to believe what we believe and to do what we want them to do. 

First on our language agenda is, of course, to label people, places and things. Depending on our intent, biases, or predispositions, for instance, a medical doctor becomes a “health professional,” a “physician,” a “cutup artist,” or a “quack,” and a public relations man becomes a “corporate communicator,” a “spin master,” a “hack writer,” or a “flack.” We do this not to denigrate people per se, but only to quickly indicate our attitude and feelings toward the subject. Without labeling our subjects, it would take us an unduly long time to put them in context for our audiences. Rightly or wrongly then, the idea behind labeling in suasive diction is simply to achieve economy in language. We label things simply because time is short and we don’t have all the time in the world to explain ourselves. 

Using labels is only the beginning of how we slant our language. Even without meaning to or often without knowing it, we take recourse to idiomatic expressions, clichés, slogans and metaphors to drive home our point more efficiently. Most of us know, for instance, that “it’s water under the bridge” and “as sure as the sun sets in the west” are horribly timeworn clichés, but we still compulsively use them to emphasize our point. We have no qualms of running clichés to exhaustion, unless we happen to be professional speakers or writers who must come up with new ways of saying things as a matter of honor. In fact, the only time we are more circumspect about using them is when we write something for the public record or for publication under our names. Like most everybody else, we don’t want to have any evidence of lack of originality or of shameless copycatting to be taken against us. 

There are, however, two major disciplines that methodically and ruthlessly use clichés, slogans, and metaphors for mind-bending purposes: advertising and politics. Here, we enter that region of language where hardly anything said is exactly what it means literally. We come face-to-face with “double-speak” or rhetoric exploited to the hilt, language that often teeters at the very outer edges of the truth and carried out by incessant repetition. It is suasive diction that, for good or ill, seeks to build niches in our minds for all sorts of marketing or political agenda. We can see, of course, that the mass media is chockfull of advertising that uses this kind of slanted language; as to particular specimens of the political propaganda, we need not dwell on them here since we are in the midst of a viciously fought national election season. It is enough that we are forewarned against taking them at their face value, and that we forearm ourselves by learning how to appreciate their messages critically and intelligently. As they say in Latin, caveat emptor, a warning that what we are dealing with here is language that’s barbed all over inside. 

These thoughts about advertising and politics bring us to the use of grammatical ambiguity as a tool for suasive diction. Remember our lessons for using “it”-cleft sentences to achieve emphasis? By definition, we defined the cleft as one that “cleaves” or splits a single-clause sentence into two clauses for semantic emphasis, and the “it-cleft” is that variety that uses the function word “it” to highlight an object of special focus or theme, as in this statement: “It appears that our candidate will score a landslide victory.” In advertising and political propaganda, this sentence construction is often designed to artfully hide the source of the statement of the “experiencer” to make it appear as a fact rather than a conjecture. That sleight of language gives the semblance of certainty—a deliberate distortion of language to create what we all know as the “bandwagon” effect. 

In suasive diction, therefore, it behooves us not only to watch our own language, but also the language of those who would deliberately subvert it to promote their agenda at our expense. (March 18, 2004)
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This essay originally appeared in the author’s weekly column “English Plain and Simple” in The Manila Times, March 18, 2004 issue, © 2004 by Manila Times Publishing.

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In the farming village where I grew up there was a man—a maker of homemade coconut oil—who did not believe in anything his mind could not grasp or which lay outside the life he knew. Let us call him Pedro de la Cruz. He was born at about the same time as my father in the early decades of the last century, but for some reason his schooling was cut short in the second grade, while my father went on to normal school in Manila to become a schoolteacher. Pedro thus could not understand, write, or speak English beyond the usual peremptory greetings like “Good morning!” or “Good afternoon!” Even these he affected to be beneath his dignity saying. In fact, he viewed with contempt people who spoke English in his presence; once they had left, he would spit on the ground and call them social climbers who surely would not make it to wherever it was they were going. “Mark my words,” he would say in the dialect, “they who think they are so good in a foreign tongue will soon come crashing to the ground!”

Pedro, along with his whole family, was intensely religious. Prayer colored his day as it did his wife Pilar’s, who was also hardly literate; his eldest son Gregorio, who was my classmate in grade school; Jacinto, the next born; and Teresita, their only daughter. Every morning when the parish church bell rang some two kilometers away, and again at Angelus, they would stop their hand-driven coconut press and pray all the Mysteries of the Holy Rosary. Sundays they would don their Sunday’s best for Holy Mass without fail, all five going to church on foot. Their religiosity, together with the almost unceasing oil-making in their small, hand-driven mill, was the central unifying force of their lives.

Pedro was fiercely obstinate about the worldview that sustained this way of life. One time, back from Manila during a summer college break, I made the mistake of discussing Darwin’s Theory of Evolution with him. I explained that Darwin had determined that man might have sprung from the same prehistoric ancestral stock as that of the apes. This launched Pedro into a strangely eloquent diatribe against the false beliefs fostered by science and the infidels they produced. He gave me the disconcerting feeling that I was the biology teacher being prosecuted by William Jennings Bryan during the Scopes Monkey Trial, the only difference being that Clarence Darrow was nowhere around to defend me. And on matters like this, Pedro simply had to have the last word. You had to give up the argument because if you didn’t, it would go on past midnight in his hut, which in those days without electricity would be lit only by a flickering coconut-oil lamp.

Pedro’s deep religiosity resulted in a frightening determinism. “Not a leaf will fall from the tree if God will not will it,” he would intone with fire in his eyes, “and that leaf will surely rise back to the twig if he wished it.” He also believed that God would surely provide for his family no matter what happened. For this reason, he did not think it necessary for any of his children to be educated beyond the level he had attained. In fact, he thought that every learning beyond this was simply a form of needless expense, a totally irrelevant enterprise that would only corrupt the way one ought to earn a living, grow into adulthood, raise a family, and end up in the grave like everybody else.

The impact of this worldview was most profound in the case of Gregorio, who was in the same class with me from the second to the sixth grade. Gregorio’s talent in arithmetic was astonishing. He could add an eight-level array of ten-digit numbers in less than a minute, and could multiply a ten-digit number by another ten-digit number almost as fast. His grasp of English, unfortunately, was just above rudimentary. There had been no English-language reading materials in the de la Cruz household to stoke the fires of his otherwise brilliant mind, and the siblings could not or did not dare speak English with him. There was also no radio to stimulate his English comprehension; his father thought it a nuisance and a vexation to the spirit (TV was still a good 25 years away into the future). Had his English been at least as good as mine, which was by no means that good, I have no doubt that he would have been our class valedictorian. He could have gone on to high school and college and surely could have made something of himself, perhaps a mathematics or physics professor in a major university. But this was not be.

Because Pedro did not send anyone of the siblings to high school and kept a life of penury, no money went out of the family bourse except those that went to food and the upkeep of their manual oil-making equipment. He kept his hut the thatched roof affair that it had always been, dismissing galvanized iron sheets as no good because they got so hot in summers; bought no motor vehicle, preferring to move on foot as always and to continue using a carabao-drawn cart to haul coconut and other cargo to his oil mill; and forced his family to live totally without entertainment and vice. This made the de la Cruz family outwardly prosperous and even enabled them to extend loans to the neighborhood in the form of coconut oil or petty cash. An emboldened Pedro could thus boast to the villagers that without even learning a word of English and without making his children take nonsense subjects in high school and college, his family was better off than most except the jueteng operator and the U.S. Navy pensionados in town.

The neighborhood grew and flowed out; villagers moved to town, to the cities, to countries unknown and unheard off; houses big and small, built by money from overseas, sprouted all over. But Pedro’s hut stood unruffled and unchanged. After he and his wife passed away, the de la Cruz siblings continued to live in the same small, unfenced plot of land. They built satellite huts around their father’s, raised families, and set up their own hand-driven oil mills. But each had no dream or ambition beyond what their father had decreed. From each of the four hand-driven mills there would issue, day in and day out, the same peculiar sweetish odor of burnt coconut. Pedro’s legacy of a world without English would keep it that way until it had totally spent itself.
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This essay originally appeared in the author’s “English Plain and Simple” column in The Manila Times in 2002 and subsequently became part of his book English Plain and Simple: No-Nonsense Ways to Learn Today’s Global Language © 2004 by Jose A. Carillo. Copyright 2008 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

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